9 Effective Ways to Increase Your Guitar Picking Speed

Working on increasing your picking speed is not just for the hell fire speed guru wannabe’s.

Once your speed increases your whole style of playing loosens up. Your fingers will feel light and flexible and you’ll gain more freedom in your playing.

Your fingers will float easily across the strings without trying so hard. It’s an important skill to work on and to maintain.

Increasing your picking speed comes with obstacles, victories, ups and downs, lots of patience and hard work. It’s all about practicing and equally important “the right way of practicing”. Just practicing a lot of hours doesn’t necessarily increase your picking speed if you don’t do it the right way.

Every individual has it’s own specific hurdles to overcome, but if you focus on these tips you are already off to a great start.

You can do it too!

1 – Practice slow
Most people know this already but don’t have the patience to go slow. Everyone wants to go fast now not later. But in order to go fast we got to slow down first!

Do not ignore this rule or you will become a sloppy guitar player.

Start out slow and gradually build up your speed. Make sure you play with proper hand position and good posture. Don’t go any faster until you can play each note Clear, Correctly and Comfortably.

2 – Use alternate picking
The most used picking technique to increase speed is the alternate picking technique.

There are other picking techniques as well like economy/sweep picking but alternate picking is the most common one and it creates a certain sound that is different from other techniques.

Alternate picking means you hold the pick between your thumb and index finger with the pointed end facing toward the strings. You strictly use alternating down and up strokes. The first note you play is downstroke, the second an upstroke, the third one a downstroke, the fourth one an upstroke and so on.

3 – Use a metronome
To learn to play accurate and get your speed up to a high level you need to learn to play with a metronome. You can get a metronome at your local guitar store, download a metronome app for your Iphone/Ipad or you can find one online.

4 – Avoid tension
When you try to play faster your fingers probably get more tense. Tension reduces speed so try to loosen up while your playing. Relax those muscles a bit. Be constantly aware of this while you build up your speed. Also avoid any tension in other parts of the body like your wrists, arms, hands, shoulders and back. They all have an effect on your playing.

5 – Practice fast
Once you’re able play slow clear, correctly and comfortably you can try to play faster. Sometimes even a little faster than you think you can handle.

You can compare it to weight lifting. Sometimes you want to try to lift some heavier weights, a bit heavier than you’re used to just to try to exceed your limits. Then you’ll take a short rest and turn to some lighter weights. You’ll notice the lighter weights have becomes easier to handle than before.

The same thing works for practicing speed. Sometimes you need to turn up the BPM (beats per minute) on your metronome and go a little faster than you’re used to in order to exceed your limits.

Note: You still need to practice slow, because practicing slow makes you learn to play clear and accurate. Practicing fast is to build speed.

6 – Analyze your playing
Analyze your playing every single workout. Take notes from your observations. Study your left and right hand. Where do you come short? What and why doesn’t work the way you want it? Be creative, think and come up with exercises or solutions to make it work.

For example: If your ring finger and pinky are to weak to speed up, then create an exercise for just those two fingers to get them in shape.

7 – Video yourself
Another great way to see what you are actually doing (analyze) and how you’re doing (progress) is to video yourself each workout or once a week (if you’re busy). You can really take a close look at your hand position and posture. You’ll see things you probably won’t notice otherwise.

It’s also a neat way to see how far you’ve come and see the difference in your technique and speed over time.

8 – Practice regularly
Increasing speed is not an overnight thing. To play really fast can take months even years of practicing, but if you work on increasing speed you will get results quite fast and within a couple of weeks or months you’ll become much faster and flexible than you’ve every played before which is also great benefit because it will have a huge effect on your overall playing.

So…..
Practice regularly better yet practice daily for a half an hour to an hour to get virtuoso results.
If you don’t have this much time then 15 minutes of daily speed practice will get you great results as well.

Again it’s not just how much you practice but also how you practice. Keep that in mind. But anyway regular practice is a must.

Hi, im reading you every day, this web become my favorite to improve my skills, you are an inspiration to me and many guitar players. Can you give me pls an advice to use the metronome? Im currently working on Scuttle Buttin but i want improve my current speed.

Hi Klaus
After 30 years of strumming and a bit of fingerpicking, I’ve found the motivation to try some improvisation. I’m still at at 1 and 2 slow and alternate, but combined with your impro and scales post its fun and something I should have been doing long ago, however the key is practice and patients. Keep posting its one of the most informative guitar blogs available.

Figure out the tempo (beats per minute) of the song by listening to it (count the beats you hear in the first 15 seconds of a verse or chorus and multiply it by four)
or download a bmp counter to figure it out for you.

Then turn on your metronome and slow down the speed (slower than the original tempo) until you feel comfortable enough to play along with the beat. Once you feel comfortable enough increase the speed gradually.

If you find it hard to play along with just the beat of a metronome, you can also use specific mediaplayers to slow down or increase the tempo of a song (mp3) while the pitch remains intact.
This way it’s easy to play along with the music at your own speed.

For Windows you can download Winamp with an additional plugin called “Pacemaker”. http://aol.it/nNveiS

I agree with Larry that breathing is VERY important to playing with speed. As in athletics and martial arts, a relaxed muscle moves the quickest. Lately though I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to practice speed that also improves MUSICALITY. In other words, works on speed but the notes really can mean something.

“Practicing speed while improving your musicality”
It depends on what you mean my that. If you practice scales you are improving your musicality, but I don’t know if you’re after that. I just read some of your posts.

Improving your technique by playing scale sequences will ultimately result in your ability to play melodies on the spot more easily and fluidly, because your fingers
will know their way around the fretboard. It will definitely pay off.

You can also use backing tracks to play your scales over. Find a middle of the road song in the key of C (for example) and practice your C scale in different positions, go through some sequences and try to make some melody with those scales and sequences. That’s a start.

In your list of ways to improve picking speed, I’m surprised that you make no mention of picking hand placement, in order to achieve the stability necessary for controlled picking, fast or not. I think help in this department is essential and is something I’m personally hving trouble with. Hand positioning and stability (pinky finger position etc) is much more difficult on electric guitar than an acoustic due to the exta hardware – pickups, tremolo equipment, control knobs etc. Could you please extend your list by one, to cover this subject?
Thanks for all your help
Mike

Your absolutely right . Effective Fast picking is 70% correct hand placement and the rest is proper practise including slowing sequences down etc . If you type in nick andrews into youtube , I do a lesson on how to pick like paul gilbert .

Its all about isolating and using the right muscles. Using the wrong muscles results in tension . Wat

I dont know why sometimes m able to play faster but not everytime. i dont have metronome i practice without metronome. Thanks for these notes . i shall practice the same . i wish i could play canon rock Jerry C

I just came across your wonderful website right on time ! Though I started learning guitar a bit late ( I’m 26 now), I think your article will lead me in the right path, right from the start. I’ll definitely use these techniques as I practice and update soon, probably in a few months. Thank you so much.